While lewd comments may disqualify a passenger from a flight, it doesn’t disqualify Donald Trump from running for president.
Photograph: Clay Lacy And Chad Slattery/AP

Imagine what the 2016 presidential election would be like if Alaska Airlines were in charge. Donald Trump would have been shown the door a long, long time ago.

On 9 October, the Seattle-based air carrier kicked a passenger off flight 520 from Seattle to Burbank for harassing a female flight attendant.

The man in question didn’t call the attendant “disgusting”. He didn’t say she had “the face of a dog”. He didn’t call her “a neurotic and not very bright mess”. He didn’t walk in on her while she was naked and expecting privacy, or brag about grabbing her genitalia or force a kiss on her.

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Those actions do not disqualify one from being a Republican presidential candidate. But they would keep someone out of even a middle seat on Alaska Airlines.

This is what happened, according to Amber D Nelson, head of a southern California marketing and communications firm called Lingo Consulting who was on flight 520.

“Today I had an experience that drove home so powerfully the way it feels to be a woman in the world today,” Nelson posted on Facebook Sunday.

“Before takeoff from SeaTac the flight attendants ran through their safety rules as they always do,” continued Nelson, 44. “Not all of us were paying very close attention. But a man in the row behind me changed all that by calling out ‘ooh sexy!’ in response to a female flight attendant demonstrating how to use the life vest.”

The female passengers on either side of the offender were visibly uncomfortable. Nelson and the two other women in her row were upset, too. They were all uncertain, Nelson said, about what to do.

Because they were all affected by the boorish behavior, and they were “trapped on a plane with a guy who clearly disrespected women and saw us as his own personal entertainment.”

But before anyone could speak up, the flight attendant took off the vest, stopped the safety demonstration and strode up to the man.

“You need to be respectful,” she said.

“C’mon, I’m just playing with you!” he responded.

The woman walked to the front of the plane and consulted with her colleagues. Soon, what Nelson described as “an affable-looking man” boarded the plane and headed to the passenger in question.

With that, he was escorted off, as the rest of the crowded plane looked approvingly on, struggling not to applaud.

“I felt honored as a patron of the airline – and as a woman – because Alaska Airlines supported their staff and those of us on board who were demeaned by another passenger’s juvenile and exceedingly disrespectful behavior,” Nelson wrote.

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Alaska Airlines confirmed the incident in a three-sentence statement, which ended: “We stand behind the actions taken by our employees.”

By Wednesday, 14,000 people had responded to Nelson’s Facebook account of the incident, with more than 1,000 people posting comments. “This is how rape culture is stopped,” wrote one.

But not all were as supportive: “Poor weak women so soft and weak … that is your point, right?” responded one man. “This flight attendant should be fired for abuse of the passenger,” wrote another.

Nelson told the Guardian that she wrote about the incident on Facebook because she “just needed to say out loud that this is not acceptable to me”. She expected to hear from 15 or so friends and family members, she said, and was stunned by the reaction – how widespread and politicized it was.

Nelson believes that the male passenger’s behavior is of a piece with American culture and politics these days. On Friday, the video surfaced of Trump lewdly bragging about accosting women with impunity, she noted, and “I heard the same thing everyone else did.”

“To be confronted with this on Sunday afternoon, to me it was a test,” Nelson said. “I was thinking, ‘What’s going to happen next? Are we going to accept this?’… And then to watch the debate, it was a triple whammy.”

Not surprisingly, many who responded to Nelson on Facebook connected the same dots.

Wrote one woman: “Does this mean someone will ask Trump to gather his belongings and exit the country?”